Free Sultry with a Twist by Macy Beckett Page B

“He needs someone to teach him to love. Think on that.” Then she left that bombshell suspended in midair and walked downstairs to make supper.
    June stared into the empty hall. Teach him to love? Apparently, he had a firm grip on the concept—wasn’t his ex-wife living proof? Luke knew how to love other women, just not her. And no matter how badly June wanted to, she couldn’t teach him how to do that.

Chapter 7
    Luke wasn’t sure how it started, but when he and June were kids, they used to hold their breath when they’d pass a graveyard. This didn’t present much of a challenge while cruising by in Pru’s old, brown station wagon, but bicycle rides—and especially walks—had stretched their lungs to the limit, and they’d always made it a contest to see who could reach the rusted, iron gates that bordered the cemetery without exhaling. Funny, he hadn’t thought of that in years. But now, as he crossed the threshold into Sultry County Memorial Hospital, he held his breath once again. After all, there were dead people under his feet—several floors below, resting in the morgue.
    Luke hated hospitals. In fact, until Trey’s accident the other day, he’d managed to avoid setting foot in one for nearly a decade. When he’d broken his nose—once playing a friendly game of football with his squadron, and again during a not-so-friendly bar brawl with some drunken Bavarians—he’d insisted on receiving treatment in the doctor’s office. Why would he want to expose himself to the diseases and plagues of a thousand people, all crammed into one foul-smelling building? Nothing good happened within these walls. Hell, at that very moment, a dozen people were probably dying all around him. Morbid? Maybe. But true, all the same.
    As he approached the elevators, he slowed his pace, allowing a group of visitors to file inside and head off to their destinations. He didn’t want to share a ride, partly because those strangers were trailing germs from someone’s bedside, and also because he’d just left the Jenkins house after eight hours of demolition work, and he smelled riper than a month-old carcass.
    “Going up?” A teenage boy with blue hair and a pierced lip held the elevator door.
    “Nah,” Luke said with a wave. “I’ll catch the next one.”
    Rolling his eyes, the kid let the doors slide shut, and Luke pulled off his baseball cap and used it to press the up button. Hundreds of people pushed that switch every hour, and he knew it was crawling with flu viruses, or worse. Normally he didn’t fret about that stuff, but he couldn’t afford to get sick—not now.
    When Luke stepped onto the fourth floor, he immediately flinched back. The odor of bleach and vomit slammed his nostrils with the force of a freight train. “God damn,” he whispered. Holding his breath again, and not out of respect for the dead this time, he rushed to Trey’s room. After one quick knock that sounded more like a body slam, he tugged open the door and bolted inside.
    “Hell, buddy,” Trey said with one lifted brow and a sardonic grin, “come on in.”
    Luke immediately shut the door to block out the smell. Stepping forward, he collapsed into the chair farthest from Trey’s bed, but he stiffened and grasped the armrests when a woman’s form rose from her chair on the opposite side of the room.
    He recognized the perfectly styled, silver hair that curled in a bob and rested atop the lady’s rigid shoulders. She glanced down and picked a bit of lint off her designer blouse, then smoothed a set of nonexistent wrinkles from her tan slacks.
    Luke stood from his seat. “Sorry, Mrs. Lewis. Didn’t know you were here.”
    “Hello, Private Gallagher.” Trey’s mom tipped her head in a greeting, polite, but still colder than Hitler’s grave. Her eyes, bright blue, just like Trey’s, turned to slits, somehow managing to look down at him, despite the fact that he towered two feet over her. He’d only met her once before, after